I learned the business from the age of fourteen

On the island of Aix in Charente-Maritime, Hervé Gallet, from the workshop of nacrier created by his father, wants to revive the trade in endangered.

"I learned the business from the age of fourteen". We were six children, and during the holidays, everyone working in the company, the boys at the workshop, girls in the shop. "We are on the island of Aix, some cables from the coast of Charente-Maritime, and Hervé Gallet is probably the last French nacrier, a craft once flourishing. The family business, Gallet mother-of-Pearl, was created by his father Léon in 1954 from a souvenir shop purchased on the island two years earlier. Léon Gallet starts by creating dolls from shells picked up on the shore. Soon, these dolls become emblematic of the island of Aix. A hundred different models are produced, and the company grew, factory up to 40,000 dolls per year, which are sold on the French coast. In addition to the dolls, Léon Gallet buy shells from around the world and specializes in the work of the Pearl by creating jewellery and tableware. "My father bought his shell to importers of Meru, in the Oise département, then the main French centre of the work of the nacre that were used in marquetry and for making buttons, remembers Hervé Gallet". At the end of the 1970s, this was more than 20,000 jobs, but it has disappeared. Today, the manufacture of mother-of-Pearl buttons is the prerogative of Southeast Asia, especially in the Philippines. "After the death of Léon Gallet, in 1986, the company, which employed up to 30 employees, is its melt. Because of competition, Asian, but also the fact that on the island of 200 inhabitants, there are fewer assets, and the retirements cannot be replaced. House Gallet is stewardship and abandoned manufacturing to be limited to the sale of the productions of Southeast Asia. In 2004, Hervé Gallet resumed the paternal company, which has more than an employee. "I was fifty-six years old, I had a mechanical company where I was production manager. I wanted to revive manufacturing and perpetuate the profession of nacrier, which is a very special know-how. "The implementation of Pearl is a complex process: it begins by acid etching and a scalping at the wheel, to rid the shell of its concretions, then is the calendering and, finally, two polishing operations, with grains more purposes, and all this without heat the material, which erupts under the action of heat.

Just then the size, too delicate, with diamond tools. "The Pearl, who is also the pearls, is a calcium carbonate, a biological aragonite secreted by the mantle of some shells, such as the pearl oyster or abalone." It is a noble and rare material: 50,000 varieties of shellfish to shell, only 15 of them, coming from the warm seas, are worked, and need two years of learning before you begin to control the trade. "Hervé Gallet 200,000 euros invested in the purchase of new machinery and recruited a companion who conveyed its know-how. He began to produce jewelry, for its own account as well as for Parisian or foreign designers. It also plans to diversify its markets in the direction of the luxury industry. "I am in contact with manufacturers of glasses and pens high range, where nacre can be used in overlay, as well as with some luthiers and cabinetmakers." Gallet Pearl now employs two employees full-time and seven seasonal, with a turnover in the order of 300,000 euros. Hervé Gallet, which has developed in a wing of his company, with the assistance of scientists of the Ifremer and the University of Orsay, a museum dedicated to the nacre and its uses, would also revive the trade, by establishing an approved training. "I would like to refleurisse this job, and I am not afraid to have competitors in France, on the contrary!"